A push-to-talk (PTT) service provides direct one-to-one and/or one-to-many audio communication. PTT may provide a mechanism for instantaneous communication commonly employed in wireless cellular telephone services that uses a button to place a device in a voice transmission mode. The operation of phones this way may be similar to “walkie talkie” use. A PTT service may switch a phone from full duplex mode, where both parties may hear each other simultaneously, to half duplex mode, where a single party may speak at one time. Multiple parties to the conversation may also be included. The availability of the parties may be checked before the call with the help of a presence function.
During a PTT group or chat session, it is difficult to determine who has entered or exited the session. Typically, the parties to a chat session may be displayed as a list of names on a user device (e.g., a cell phone). For example, a beep may be generated if a party enters the chat session, but such a beep does not provide any information about the entering party. Thus, in order to determine entering parties to the chat session, a user may need to constantly check the list of names on the user device, which may be time consuming and inconvenient. It is also difficult to determine who has the floor (i.e., a person who is currently speaking, while the other users are listening) during a chat session without constantly checking the display of the user device.